Jean-Claude Brisseau was discovered by Eric Rohmer in 1975 at an amateur film festival, where his first movie, La Croisée des Chemins, shot in Super 8, was being screened. At the time, Brisseau taught French in a Paris-suburb middle school, a profession he exercised for more than twenty years. Shortly afterwards, he was hired by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, which in 1978 produced his first feature-length film, La Vie Comme Ça (Life The Way It Is), initially made for television. His next films, shot directly for theatrical release, dealt with big-city cruelty and violence, both physical and psychological; into this urban reality he incorporated spiritual and metaphysical elements, the secret to his unique approach, and combined fantasy, social commentary and romance. Mysticism and irrationality abound in the urban housing developments of De Bruit et de Fureur (Sound and Fury, 1988) – the film made a name for him at the Cannes Film Festival that same year – and seep from the walls of the provincial abode in Céline (1992). He also offered unique roles to actresses with a strong public image, going against their usual current, whether it be Vanessa Paradis in Noce Blanche (White Wedding, 1989), her first movie role, or Sylvie Vartan in L’Ange Noir (The Black Angel, 1994), which costarred Michel Piccoli and Tchéky Karyo, while the mesmerizing music was composed by Jean Musy. Six years later, Jean-Claude Brisseau shot Les Savates du Bon Dieu (Workers for the Good Lord), starring Stanislas Merhar and Raphaële Godin; director and film-critic Louis Skorecki heralded the movie as “a sublime Hollywood melodrama, a cross between Under Capricorn and The Barefoot Contessa.” With Choses Secrètes (Secret Things, 2002) and Les Anges Exterminateurs (The Exterminating Angels, 2006), which was shown in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, he turned his attention to transgression and female desire in a singularly unprecedented way.

An extraordinary cineaste, and an avid fan of Hitchcock and Buñuel, Jean-Claude Brisseau makes films that walk a cinematic tightrope and divert from the norm with utter control. His movies are both popular and marginal, traditional and experimental, uncompromising, fearless, are free of moral judgment and recognize no taboos. “Buñuel went through hell during the last thirty years of his life,” said Skorecki, “and Brisseau is courageously looking at two or three decades of being misunderstood.”

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